The Crocodile Bird Read online

  “Just for that? Just so Tobias wouldn’t get mad at her?”

  Liza looked at him doubtfully. “I don’t know. Now you put it like that, I really don’t know. Perhaps there was more to it. Perhaps she had some other reason, something to make her hate him, but we’re never going to know that, are we?”

  She watched Sean as he got up and washed at the sink. He put his jeans back on again and found himself a clean T-shirt. It occurred to her that she hadn’t any clothes except the ones lying in a heap on the floor. She’d have to wear his, or those of his that would fit her, and when she’d made some money picking apples … The hundred pounds, she had forgotten the hundred pounds.

  “I want to drive into town, wherever that is,” she said, “and go and eat in a real restaurant. Can we?”

  “’Course we can. Why not? We can go and have a Chinese.”

  Liza washed her knickers and her socks at the sink. She had to put her jeans on over nothing but that didn’t much matter. Her jeans were a cause of great pride, not least because it had been such a struggle getting Eve to let her have them. She’d managed to get two pairs, these and a pair she’d left behind. Eve hated trousers and had never worn jeans in all her life. Liza borrowed a long-sleeved check shirt with a collar from Sean and thought a little about Eve, wondering where she was now and what was happening to her.

  Sean had been thinking the same thing. “We ought to get a paper tomorrow. You haven’t never seen a paper, I suppose? A newspaper, I mean.”

  “Oh, yes, I have.” She was a bit huffy. Once, in a magazine rack at Shrove, she had found a newspaper called The Times and the date on it was the year before she was born. Eve had taken it away before she could read much of it. “What we ought to get is television.”

  “Now there’s something you’ve never seen, telly, I bet.”

  She answered him in quite a lofty way. “I used to watch it at Shrove every single day. Eve never knew, she’d have stopped it but I didn’t tell her. It was a secret thing I did.”

  “Like me,” said Sean.

  “Not really like you. You’re much better. But I didn’t know you then. I watched it for years till the set broke and Jonathan wouldn’t have it mended.” The expression on his face made her laugh. “Could we have one in here? Would your generator work it?”

  “Hopefully,” he said. “’Course it would.”

  “Then I’m going to buy one.” A thought struck her. “Only, I don’t know—is a hundred pounds a lot of money, Sean?”

  He said rather bitterly, “It’s a lot for us, love,” and then, “Hopefully it’d buy a little portable telly but I don’t know about color.”

  Her eyes grew wide. “Does it come in color? Does it really?”

  When they went outside to the car they saw that the other van, the camper, wasn’t unoccupied as they had at first thought. A light was on inside it and the blind was raised in the window nearest to the roadway. They had to pass it to get out. Inside, a fiercer, bluer glow than the overhead lamp indicated the presence of a television screen, and as they passed within a few feet Liza saw the little rectangle filled with dazzling color, emerald-green grass, yellow-spotted leaves, and an orange-and-black tiger prowling.

  “What a lot I’ve got to catch up with,” she said.

  Life at the gatehouse had been of the simplest. Much of it would seem dull to Sean, incredible. There was a good deal she wouldn’t tell him but keep locked in her memory. For instance, how, because Eve wouldn’t leave her alone in the cottage anymore even with the doors locked, couldn’t bring herself to do that when she screamed so piteously, she had been obliged to take Liza with her.

  And that was how she came to enter Shrove House for the first time. The palace, the house of pictures and secrets, dolls and keys, books and shadows. Sean would never see it quite like that, no one would but herself and Eve. Most of all Eve.

  FIVE

  THEY walked up the drive between the trees, the hornbeams that were nearly round in shape and the larches that were pointed, the silver birches whose leaves trembled in the breeze and the swamp cypresses that came from Louisiana but grew happily here because it was damp by the river. There were giant cedars and even taller Douglas firs and Wellingtonias taller than that, black trees you saw as dark green only when you were close up underneath them. The trees parted and she saw the house for the first time and to her then it was no more than a big house with an enormous lot of windows.

  A man was mowing the grass, sitting up in a high chair on wheels. She had seen him once or twice before and was often to see him again. His name was Mr. Frost, he wasn’t a young man, but had wrinkles and white hair, and he came on his bicycle from the village on the other side of the river. White hair was only another kind of fair hair and his confirmed Liza’s belief. He raised one hand to Mother and Mother nodded but they didn’t speak.

  Steps went up one side to the front door of Shrove and then there was a kind of platform before the stairs ran down the other side. The stairs had railings like theirs at the gatehouse but the rails here were made of stone with a broad stone shelf running along the tops of them. On the shelf were stone vases from which ivy hung and between the vases stone people stood looking toward the trees.

  Liza and Mother went up the flight on the left and Liza held on to the stone railings. Everything was very large and this made her feel smaller than usual. She looked up, as Mother told her, to see the coat of arms, the sword, the shield, the lions. The house towered, its windows shiny sheets, its roof lost in the sky. Mother unlocked the front door and they went in.

  “You will not rush about, Liza,” Mother said, “and you will not climb on the furniture. Do you understand? Let me see your hands.”

  Liza held them out. They were very clean because Mother had made her wash them before they came out and she had held Mother’s hand all the way.

  “All right. You can’t get them dirty in here. Now, remember, walk, don’t run.”

  The carpets were soft and thick underfoot and the ceilings were very high. None of the ceilings was white but done in gold and black squares or painted like a blue sky with white clouds and people with wings flying across it, trailing scarves and ribbons and bunches of flowers. The lamps were like raindrops when it is raining very hard and some of the walls had things like thin carpets hanging on them. A huge painting covered one entire wall. Mother called it The Birthday of Achilles and it showed a lot of men in helmets and women in white robes all rushing to pick up a golden apple while a woman in green with flowers stood by holding a fat naked baby.

  Mother took her through the drawing room and showed her the fireplace with the lady’s face on it, the screen painted with flowers, and the tables that were of shiny wood with shiny metal bits on it and some with mother-of-pearl like mother’s brooch. The tall glass doors were framed in mahogany, Mother said, and they were more than two hundred years old but as good as new. Liza and Mother went through the doorway out onto the terrace at the back, and when Liza ran down the steps and stood on the lawn and looked up at Mother, she was frightened for a moment because the back of the house was the same as the front, the same coat of arms, sword, shield, and lion, the same railing around the roof and up the stairs, the same windows and the same statues standing in the alcoves.

  Mother called out to her that it was all right, it was supposed to be that way, but that if she looked closely she would see it wasn’t quite the same. The statues were women, not men, there was no front door, and instead of ivy, small dark pointed trees grew in the stone urns on the terrace.

  So Liza ran up again and she and Mother made their way to the kitchen. Mother unhooked an apron from behind a cupboard door, a big ugly brown apron, and wrapped it around herself, covering up her white cotton blouse and long, full green-and-blue skirt. She took a clean yellow duster from a pile and tied her head up so that you couldn’t see her hair, she trundled out a vacuum cleaner and found a large, deep tin of mauve polish that smelled of lavender.

  For the next
three hours they remained in Shrove House while Mother cleaned the carpets with the vacuum cleaner, dusted the surfaces and the ornaments, and polished the tables. She couldn’t get it all done today, she said, and she explained to Liza how she did a bit one day and another bit two days later and so on, but she hadn’t been in there for two weeks because, as she put it, of one thing and another. She had been afraid of Liza being a nuisance or of breaking something, but Liza had been as good as gold.

  Remembering not to run, she had walked through all the rooms, looking at everything, at a table with a glass top and little oval pictures in frames inside, at a small green statue of a man on a horse, at a green jar with black birds and pink flowers on it that was taller than she was. One room was full of books, they were all over the walls where other rooms had paint or paneling. Another, instead of books, had those things hanging up like the one Mother had that made the explosion. She didn’t stay in there for long.

  A cabinet in one room was full of dolls in different dresses and she would have loved to touch, to get them out, she longed to, but she did what Mother told her, or if she didn’t she made sure Mother couldn’t find out. But mostly she did as she was told because as well as loving Mother so much, she was afraid of her.

  The door to a room opening out of that one was shut. Liza tried the handle and it turned, but the door wouldn’t open. It was locked, as her bedroom door used to be locked when Mother went out, and the key gone. Of course she very much wanted to get into that room, as much as anything because the door was locked. She rattled the handle, which did no good.

  There were three staircases. By this time she had learned to count up to three—well, to six, in fact. She went up the biggest staircase and down the smallest, having been in every bedroom, and climbed onto one of the window seats—Mother wouldn’t find out, the vacuum cleaner could be heard howling downstairs—and looked across the flat green valley floor to watch a train go by.

  If not, then, conscious of beauty, she was aware of light, of how radiantly light the house was everywhere inside. There wasn’t a dark corner or a dim passage. Even when the sun wasn’t shining, as it wasn’t that day, a clear pearly light lit every room and the things inside the rooms gleamed, the glass and the porcelain, the silver and brass and the gilt on the moldings and cornices. The biggest staircase had flowers and fruit carved on the wood on each side of it and the carving gleamed with a deep rich glow, but all she could think of then was how much she would like to slide down the polished banister.

  They left at four o’clock, in time to get home for Liza’s reading lesson.

  “Doesn’t Mr. Tobias ever live there?” she asked, taking Mother’s hand.

  “He never has. His mother did for a while and his grandfather lived there all the time, it was his only home.” She gave Liza a thoughtful glance, as if she was pondering whether the time had come to tell her. “My mother, who was your grandmother, was his housekeeper. And then his nurse. We lived in the gatehouse ourselves, my mother, my father, and I.” Mother squeezed Liza’s hand. “You’re too young for this, Lizzie. Look up in the ash tree, see the green woodpecker? On the trunk, picking insects out with his beak?”

  So if the day the man with the beard came was called the Day of the Kingfisher, this was the Day of the Woodpecker, the day of the first visit to Shrove.

  After that Liza always went with Mother to Shrove and now, when Mother went to town on the bus, instead of locking Liza in her bedroom in the cottage, she put her in one of the Shrove bedrooms. Mostly it was the one called the Venetian Room because the four-poster bed had its posts made out of the poles used by gondoliers in Venice, Mother said. Liza could read quite well by the time she was five and had a real book in the room with her. She wasn’t in the least frightened of being shut up in the Venetian Room at Shrove, she wouldn’t have been frightened of being in her own room anymore, but she did ask Mother why Shrove and not at home.

  “Because Shrove has central heating and we don’t. I can be sure you’re warm enough. They have to keep the heating on all winter because of the damp, even though no one lives there. If it was allowed to get damp the furniture might be spoiled.”

  “Why is the little room next to the morning room always locked up?”

  “Is it?” said Mother. “I seem to have mislaid the key.”

  Shrove was to become her library and her picture gallery. More than that, for the paintings were a guide to her and a catalog of people’s faces. To them she ran when she needed to identify a new person or when confirmation was required. They were her standard of comparison and her secondhand portrait of the outside world. This was how other people looked, this what they wore, these the chairs they sat on, the other countries they lived in, the things their eyes saw.

  In the cold depths of winter, a very cold one when the river froze over and the water meadows disappeared under snow for a whole month, a black car with chains on its tires slid slowly down the lane and parked in the deep snow outside the gatehouse. There were two men inside. One stayed in the car and the other one came to the front door and rang the bell. He was a fat man with no hair at all but for a fairish fringe surrounding the great shiny pale egg that was his head.

  By chance, Liza and Mother had been sitting side by side at Mother’s bedroom window, watching the birds feeding from the nut feeders they had hung on the branches of the balsam tree. They saw the car come and the man come to the door.

  “If he talks to you you are not to say anything but ‘I don’t know,’” said Mother, “and you can cry a bit if you like. You might like that, it might amuse you.”

  Liza never found out who the man was. Of course she guessed later on. He said he was looking for a missing person, a man called Hugh something. She had forgotten his other name but Hugh she remembered.

  Hugh came from Swansea, was around these parts last July on a walking holiday, but left the B and B he was stopping at without paying for his two nights. The fat man talked a lot more about Hugh and why they were looking for him and what was making them look six months later, but Liza didn’t understand any of it. He described Hugh, which she did understand, she remembered his fair beard, she remembered tufts of it in Rudi’s mouth.

  “We are very quiet down here, Inspector,” Mother said. “We see hardly anyone.”

  “A lonely life.”

  “It depends what suits you.”

  “And you never saw this man?” He showed Mother something in the palm of his hand and Mother looked at it, shaking her head. “You didn’t see him in the lane or walking the footpath?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  Mother lifted her face and looked deep into the fat man’s eyes when she said this. Although it meant nothing at the time, when she was older, thinking back and comparing her own personal experience, Liza understood how Mother’s look must have affected him. Her full red lips were slightly parted, her eyes large and lustrous, her skin creamy and her expression oh so winsome and trusting. About her shoulders her glorious hair, a rich, dark shining brown, hung like a silk cape. She had one small white finger pressed against her lower lip.

  “It was just a possibility,” the fat man said, unable to take his eyes off her, but having to, having to drag his eyes away and speak to Liza. “I don’t suppose this young lady saw him.”

  She was shown the photograph. Apart from prints on the fronts of Mother’s books, it was the first she had ever seen, but she didn’t say so. She looked at the face which had frightened her and which Heidi and Rudi had ruined with their teeth, looked at it and said, “I don’t know.”

  This made him eager. “So you might have?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Have another look, my love, look closely and try to remember.”

  Liza was growing frightened. She was letting Mother down, she was obeying Mother but letting her down just the same. The man’s face was horrible, the bearded man called Hugh, cruel and sneering, and who knew what he would have done if Mother hadn’t …

  Sh
e didn’t have to pretend to cry. “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know,” she screamed and burst into tears.

  The fat man went away, apologizing to Mother, shaking hands with her and holding her hand a long time, and when he had gone Mother roared with laughter. She said Liza had been excellent, quite excellent, and she hugged her, laughing into her hair. For all that she loved Liza and cared for her, she hadn’t understood that she had been really frightened, really shy of people, really bewildered.

  It took the driver a long time to get the car started and an even longer time to pull it out of the snow without its wheels spinning. Liza calmed down and began to enjoy herself. She and Mother watched the driver’s struggles from the bedroom window with great interest.

  The snow went away and the spring came. Most of the trees that were coniferous looked just the same, always the same greenish black or light smoky blue, but the larches and the swamp cypresses grew new leaves like clumps of fur of an exquisite pale and delicate green. Mother explained that larches too were deciduous conifers and the only ones native to the British Isles.

  Primroses with sunny round faces appeared under the hedges and clusters of velvety purple violets close by the boles of trees. Wood anemones, that were also called windflowers and had petals like tissue paper, grew in the clearings of the wood. Mother told Liza to be careful never to pronounce them an-en-omies, as so many people did who ought to know better. Liza hardly talked to anyone but Mother, so was unlikely to hear the wrong pronunciation.

  Except the postman, though they didn’t discuss botany. And the milkman, who noticed nothing but the trains and the signs of changes in the weather, and the oilman who came to fill Shrove’s heating tank in March, and Mr. Frost, the gardener who mowed the grass and trimmed the hedges and sometimes pulled out the weeds.

  Mr. Frost went on never speaking. They saw him ride past the gatehouse on his bicycle and if he saw them he waved. He waved from his mowing machine if he happened to be there when they walked up the drive to Shrove. The oilman only came twice a year, in September and again in March. Liza had never talked to him, though Mother did for about five minutes, or listened rather, and listened impatiently, while he told her about his flat in Spain and how he had found a cut-rate flight to Malaga that was so reasonable you wouldn’t believe. Liza didn’t know what that meant, so Mother explained how he went across the sea in one of those things that flew overhead sometimes and made a buzzing noise about it, unlike birds.